PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES)
Year:2018 | Volume:25 | Issue:83 |Papers Count:17

Irony is one of the important and at the same time complex terms in rhetoric, philosophy and literary criticism that Persian texts have employed its potentialities under various headings such as satire, asterism, etc. In the meantime, one of the rhetorical basesofMasnavi isMawlawi's artistic and skillful use of humor and its various types. Mawlawi's specific skill in recognizing his audience and his dedication to explicate grand concepts of religion, mysticism and morality led him tochoosehumor as an indirect way of expression because of its high functionality, and great power to attract and persuade the audience. This paves the way for different types of irony to appear in the entire Masnavi, especially in its Fifth Book. Among different types of ironythat are present in Masnaviare verbal, situational and dramatic ironies. In this article, which is library-based and is done through descriptive-analytic method, the authors will investigate different modes of irony in Mawlawi’sMasnavi. It concludes that because of Masnavi’s allegorical and diegetic character, dramatic irony has a special standing in Masnavi.

Dr. Noon Loves His Wife More than Mussadiqis a modern political novel written by ShahramRahimian. Focusing on psychological complications of politicians, the novelgivesa different view of 1953 coup d'état in Iran. In this study, relying on Bakhtin’s definition of polyphony,we will draw out its examples from the novel and analyze its functionsthrough a descriptive-analytic method. The question to answer in this article is what features polyphony has and howit is realized inthis text. Therefore this article stresses different features of polyphony such asabrupt shift in perspective, polyglossia among the social classes, the presence of various and opposite characteristics in one fictional character, heteroglossia, and intertextuality. Then, these will be investigated in the novel to support the claim that by providing the reader with varied tools, polyphonic novels lead the audience to a new understanding of the text.

Ahli Torshizi is a poet of late ninth century A. H. and contemporary with Soltan Hussein Bayqara. His Divan was published about 50 years ago by Simon Israeli and OmraniChamraghi; yet, the biographical notes about his life are discordant, confused and at times distorted.In the later books, he is named as Muhammad ibn Yusuf, and Nafisi and consequently HadjSeyedDavoodi believe that he went to Tabriz after the decline of the Timuriadsand entered the court of SoltanYaghoub. He is also named as the author of Saghinameh and the translator ofTohfatolSoltan Fi Managebol Naman. Akhtar Khan Hogoly, ModarresTabrizi, NazmiTabrizi, and OmraniChamraghiall have also claimed that he was originally from Tabriz but because he was born in the city of Tarshizi, he is known to be of this city. On the other hand, some great biographers claim that there is a poet known as AhliNavaei or AhliChagatai who was contemporary with Ahli Tarshizi.Investigation and analysis of allthe differences and the diversions in the biographical notes on Ahlicannot be explained here. However, this paper aims to carefullyanswer the following questions:1. Was his name Muhammad ibn Yusuf?2. Did Ahli compose Saghinameh?3. Has Tarshizi translated the book of TohfatolSoltan Fi ManagebolNaman?4. Is he originally from Tabriz?5. Does a poet called AhliNavaei or Ahli Chagatai exist?6. Has Ahli entered the court of SoltanYaghoub?

Bloomfield claimed the first connotation is an independent notion in linguistics. By this term, linguists invite us to have an innovative approach to meaning. According to this approach, words as utterances could be nourished by several levels of secondary signification. How lexis of a text could be interpreted has been studied through the lens of several theories, most notably: semiotics, poetics, semantics and discourse analysis. This article approached this issue from a rhetoric-semantic perspective. Methodology in this article is primarily hermeneutics and is concerned with an analysis of connotations in the field of semantics, and exploration of the meanings of interrogative statements. Through these two approaches, the author projects an analytical model to actualize a deeper study of the latent aspect of meaning or associations of utterances in the context of literature. This model includes four features which consist of semantic, lexical, phonetic and syntactic elements. First, this article concludes that connotative significance must be considered the same as the imageries of a text; Second, it shows how to analyze the significations of the text for the purpose of distinguishing the stylistic and semantic differences of two texts or authors.

The early mystics were actively involved in Jihads wherein they strove for social and political activism and alsofought the enemies of God. Because of the Islamic conquests and wars against the infidels in the early centuries AD, many Sufis lived in conventson the borders and participated in the war against enemies. Among them the names of Hassan Basri, Sufyan Sauri, Ibrahim Adham, ShaghighBalkhi, Hatam Assam, Abdullah IbnMubarak, Mohammed ibn Karram and the followers of the Karramiyeh are noteworthy. Also, when Sufis began to write books, many of them concentrated on the issue of Jihad; among these writes we can refer to Kolabazi, Tirmazi, Neffari, Sarraj, Makki, Khargushi and Sollam .This article is a library based research and draws on the major primary sources on Mysticism. It aims to study the quality of the presence of the Sufis in Jihads, and the issue of Jihad in books by the Sufis.

Narrativization is an efficient manner to create literary texts, especially didactic ones. Two significant didacticpieces of literature, namely, Kalileve Dimne, and Golestan, have used the same method to convey their messages. This study investigates the narrative of fear and anger in the stories of these two books that have anthropomorphic animals as characters. This article aims at analyzing the narrativization of fear and anger through the study of the language of narration, modes of action and expression of the actors who experience both emotions, and also their motivations and the results of their actions. Some differences can be noticed in the language of narration, social class and the gender of the actors that is the result of the two authors’ different perspectives, the purpose of their writings and the different origins of stories.

One of the basic characteristics of satire is its humour. When dealing with supreme subjects like death, Satire sometimes movesaway from its basic characteristics such as comicality, candor and accessibility and becomes less relieving and more bitter and sad. When satire deals with death, which is always mysterious and tragic for humans, it fails to provide any absolute relief;instead it brings about short term forgetfulness in the audience through diverting their attention, and givesthem a temporary sense ofbliss. This article identifies satire of death as a complex genre and analyzes its different aspects in samplepoems by Shams Langaroudi. We will see that Shams uses different methods of satire of death to deal with this phenomenon and its related concepts such as thanatophobia. The article reveals that satire of death in poems of Shams reflects human's fear and apprehension about certainty of death and emphasizes the physical and bodily dimension of human being in the natural world.

Otherness is one of the methods of accessing hidden interests beyond the literary texts which through literary discourse analysis can be in direct relation to political science and sociology. Critical discourse analysis believes that each text is shaped by political and ideological approaches and the relationship between political issues and texts is not an accidental one. Laclauand Mouffe believe that in every discourse one can use two concepts of logic of equality and logic of difference to explain the relations of otherness present in literary texts. That is, in every discourse, a positive pole is foregrounded as“we”or ours, and on the opposite pole the negative side is introduced as“they”or “others”. Foregrounding and backgrounding are used in texts and discourse through language functions. Investigatingthis method in some of Khayyam's Quatrains we will find out why Khayyam has pursued a kind of polarization in his quatrains and also will realize how Khayyam, along with his philosophical views expressed in his Quatrains, has tried to suggest political and critical motives through his discourse.

The Tragic story of Siavash is one the significant and remarkable stories in Firdausi’s Shahnameh. In this article, the authors will study this story through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis and based on Van Leeuwen’s network of Social Actors. This is to show how social interactors have been portrayed and see how the poem has reproduced and represented the discourses by linguistic parameters. To this end, dialogic couplets have been singled out, categorized and analyzed. The findings show that Firdausi has equally used latent and manifest parameters. Therefore, concealment of the narrators is as important as characterization and the development of the setting. Moreover, although the story of Siavash is an ancient narrative, it carries with itself Firdausi’s worldview and his emotional, ideological overtone and thus represents Iranian’s idealism, their zeal for identity and conflict between Good and Evil and the final triumph of the Good. The death of Siavash entails the vengeance of the Iranians, and the birth of his son, Keykhosrow, brings about the victory over Afrasiab.

One of the popular stories in Shahnamehis Rustam’squestto Mazandaran in order to rescue Kavoos and his soldiers, which led him into killingDivSepid (the white demon), rescuingKavoos from captivity, and also entrusting Mazandaran to his children. This story, which is known as Haft-khan Rustam, has influenced a number of heroic poems, manuscripts of rhapsodies and oral/public narrativesof Shahnameh. The influence that these works have from the narratives of Rustam’s battle with the demons of Mazandaran can be classified into two categories: first, in many of these texts, are various narratives about or references to Rustam’sjourney to Mazandaran and his battle with DivSepid. Second, in some Iranian epic texts, be it poetry or prose, a number of demons or descendants ofDivSepid are present that each try to take revenge on Rustam or one of the members of his family. But, in all of these stories, they either have failed or were killed by the hero. Although these types of narratives have briefly been expressed in most of Iranian public prose literature, they have been expressed in more details in a number of texts including ShabrangNameh, ShahriyarNameh, and TheNew BorzoNameh. In this paper, first, these types of narratives in some heroic pieces of poetry are addressed. Then, common grounds or differences of these stories with the narrative of Shahnameh are analyzed.

Although literary texts are extensively taught at schools and universities, to date the attitude of Iranian students towards literary texts has remainedunderstudied. Taking this research gap into account, the writers of the present article adopted a descriptive-analytical approach and examined a sample of students' attitudes towards Persian contemporary poems. Taking Vala (2011) theoretical model, three concepts, i.e. evaluation, comprehensibility, and impressiveness are considered. Next, two poems including" Remember the flight, the bird is mortal" by Forouq Farokhzad, and "Abyss" penned by Ahmad Shamlou are selected and used to design a researcher-made questionnaire. 120 students of Humanities read the poems and answered the questions. The findings indicated that the participants evaluate the level of the poems higher than the mean. They stated that the poems are comprehensible and fairly express their emotions. Analyzing the data with respect to the gender variable showed that the male and female participants have quite the same attitude concerning the evaluation and impressiveness of the poems, but a significant difference was noticed in comprehensibility as the female participants believed that the poems are more complex. The subjects maintained that "Abyss" was more complex than"Remember flight, the bird is mortal". The subjects selected "loneliness" and "despotism" as the key concepts of the poems of Farokhzad and Shamlou respectively. We believe that measuring the attitudes of language users towards literary works contributes to the educational syllabus design and opens a novel horizon in the interdisciplinary studies with the emphasis on Persian language and literature.

Simile, which appears in different modes, is one of the major subjects of a branch of rhetoric called Bayan. Some of these modes, such as intellectual-intellectual and sensible-intellectual are not in harmony with the illuminating role of simile; therefor, the books on Bayanhardlyhave positive attitudes towards these modes of simile, but contrary to this attitude, such similes appear with a high frequency in some literary ages and some Persian texts. By critiquing and analyzing the intellectual similes in Tarikh-e-Vassaf, this article tries to study the reason why these similes were widely used. This research shows that Vassaf’s tendency for this mode of simile was because of his penchant for breaking with tradition and departing from the literary norms, widespread desire for innovation, the limitations of creating simile’s by the restricted views of ancients, general inclination for circumlocution, and a tendency to use the exaggerated forms of imageries. By using artistic elegances, the author of Tarikh-e-Vassaf has tried to elude the negative consequences of these similes, yet he has not been successful in all his efforts. Moreover, one of the important reasonswhy the text is abstruse and obscure, is the high frequency of intellectual similesin this text.

One of the most important issues in narratologicalstudy of Masnavi is methods of reading and interpreting the allegories. The relationship between this subject and narration is best revealed when we attend to the relationship between interpretations and storylines, regardless of the content of those interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the methods by which Mawlawiinterpreted the allegories narrated in Masnavi. It can be said that presenting the interpretations on the syntagmatic axis is the most important property of Masnavi. To interpret these stories, Mawlawi reads these as separated storylines, then, presents an interpretation corresponding to each of them. Multiplicity of these storylines is the result of two factors: Multiplicity of characters and Multiplicity of sequences. In this process, the value of main storylines is equal to subsidiary ones. Therefore, sometimes, the motivation (initial interpretation) of telling an allegory is not proportionate to the final and medial ones. The validity of the storylines for presenting the interpretations is both a factor for polysemy of allegories of Masnavi, and a presenter of a narratological explanation for association in Masnavi.

The Poetry of the Constitutional period in Iran has been a turning point away from encomiums and mystical poetry of the prior ages. This shift is primarily characterized by a poetry dealing with socio-political issues such as freedom, homeland, etc. Contemporaneity of the Jadidieh Period in Tajikistani Poetry with this era in Iran paved the way for the maturation of the Constitutional Poetry in Iran. The method of the research is analytic-comparative and aims to investigate how this two interact in terms of subjects and contents. This study classifies the poets into three categories of “patriots” (like AdibulmamalekFarahani and Irajmirza in Iran and Fitrat in Tajikestan), “revolutionaries” and “elegiast” (like NasimShomal and MomenGhena’at in Iran). Studying the poetry in this period shows that the title “Motherland” is the first shared subject of Iranian poetry (Constitutional movement period) and Tajikistan (Jadidieh) which replaced the romantic lyrics of the previous age. The poets in the era of “Awakening” and modernism speak in their poems of their love of homeland, “freedom”, “prosperity” and “progress”. The topic of “homeland” both reveals the universality of the subject in the literature of this era and also indicates the changes in their essence and tones. Of other common thematic issues are 1- Fighting with dictatorship inside the country and defending motherland against foreign threats, 2- human rights, women’s rights and gender equality, 3- freedom and law, 4- acquiring modern sciences and education, 5- reforming and modernizing poetic topics and using colloquial terms, 6- fighting with religious superstitious ideas and ignorance.